Drying Out Suggested For Boating

Statistics On Drunken Boating Have Led The National Transportation Safety Board To Urge States To Crack Down.

April 14, 1993|By Washington Post

WASHINGTON — The National Transportation Safety Board said Tuesday that states should crack down on drunken boating, require children to wear life jackets at all times on the water, and consider mandatory training and licensing for boat operators.

The board said that recreational boating is the second-greatest transportation killer, with 924 fatalities recorded in 1991. That is far behind highway deaths but ahead of airline crashes. An unknown, but obviously high number of those fatalities were because of alcohol, the board said.

The NTSB cited the alcohol-related accident that took the lives of Cleveland Indians pitchers Tim Crews and Steve Olin in Lake County on March 22. Crews, who was piloting the boat, had a blood alcohol level of .14 percent. The board said boating is the only form of transportation easily available to untrained, unprepared, inexperienced people who often arrive at the dock with a cooler of alcoholic beverages.

''We think the problem of alcohol needs to be emphasized,'' said chairman Carl Vogt, as the board completed action on a report likely to raise hackles in the free-spirited boating world. Its release was timed for the beginning of the summer boating season.

The board said state laws on boating and alcohol are so varied that it is not possible to measure the extent of the problem. The District of Columbia, for example, has no blood-alcohol standard for drunken boating. Virginia and Maryland have much stiffer laws, and Maryland is one of three states - with Connecticut and Vermont - to start a boater-licensing program.

''The extent of alcohol use trends in recreational boating cannot be adequately determined,'' said the report to all 50 governors, District of Columbia Mayor Sharon Pratt Kelly, the Coast Guard and other groups.

But the report said available evidence proves that the problem is serious. It cited a board survey of 18 states which showed that 75 percent of the boat operators who were tested for alcohol tested positive, the study stated.

A major problem, however, is that because of the hodgepodge of state laws, only about a quarter of boat operators involved in fatal accidents were tested. The report stated, however, that even if all the untested operators were assumed to be sober, drinking operators would still account for 37 percent of the total - still unacceptably high.

The board urged all states to enact laws setting standards for drunken boating and to test all dead or surviving boat operators involved in fatal accidents. Operators should also be tested if suspected of impairment, said the board, which has no power to set rules but whose recommendations often lead to action by other governmental bodies.

The report contained several case histories of drownings involving boaters who did not wear life jackets or other flotation devices, some of them graphically describing children who slipped beneath dark waters before adults could reach them.

Of the 407 fatalities in the 18-state survey, 85 percent were not wearing flotation devices, the report stated. Thirty-six children survived accidents, 15 of them because they wore life jackets.

The board trod lightly on what is likely to be its most controversial idea, licensing boat operators. Vogt said the board recommended that states look at licensing, but several board members expressed discomfort with the idea.